“Tomorrow night,” she said, looking toward the weatherworn tombstones of the Burying Ground, “we’ll exhume A. Edward.”
Could I refuse? The threat, though unspoken, was implicit. Yet, human emotions being what they are, I was neither shocked nor offended by this crude coercion. I still felt grateful. “All right,” I said. “All right, I’ll help. It’s the least I can do.”
She rose then and went back to the house, swinging her cane like a Georgian dandy.
11
WE UNCOVER AN ENIGMA
How my manuscript grows! The hatching proliferates like lichen, from one sheet of paper to the next. Will this explanation really serve a purpose? Who knows? If nothing else, it serves as a catharsis—or an exorcism, perhaps.
Madge Clerisy was an accomplished conniver. I can see now that even her Fourth of July revelation was cleverly planned. Knowing I’d killed Norbie, she was careful to make her accusation out in the open in broad daylight lest I take a notion to treat her in similar fashion. My explanation, however, obviously put her mind at ease. She could see I was no raving maniac, no Jack the Ripper. Yet, to be sure, she had courage.
That next night, then, we got shovels and wheelbarrow and went to work. As Madge could wield a shovel as well as a man, the task progressed swiftly. Four feet down, we went, then five, then six, then seven. We found nothing at all! It was inexplicable. I kept glancing at the headstone; it was definitely the right grave, but where was the occupant? At last we accepted defeat. There was neither a body nor a coffin, nor any indication that a body or a coffin had ever been buried there. That decay could consume everything in a mere forty years was utterly absurd, but what was the explanation?
Madge spent some time at the bottom of the trough, poking the clay with her Malacca stick and throwing me queer, angry looks. If I’d hit her on the head with my shovel then, and filled in the hole, it might have been better for all of us; however, I couldn’t know what the future held in store. Besides, I was far too bewildered by this new turn of events to consider such a crazy idea.
I therefore helped her climb put. Silently we dumped the soil back and replaced the divots.
12
AHMED AND THE CACHED PHARAOHS
“Well?” she asked, firing the word at me like a ball from an arbalest.
Perspiration trickled down her fine face, and the coils of jetty hair that hung before her ears were damp and gleaming. It suddenly came to me that she bore an uncanny resemblance to the famous Minoan priestess who is depicted on the ancient walls of Knossus—the lady with the bare bosom and a snake in each hand.
“What can I say? I saw him buried there with my own eyes,” I answered.
“Then why is the grave empty?” she snapped, leaning forward in the saber-legged chair.
“I have no idea, unless it’s some sort of practical joke—though what the point of it would be, I can’t imagine.”
“If we have to, Al, we’ll dig up the whole blasted cemetery to find him.”
“That would be foolish, my dear. For all we know, Mr. Piero could have shipped the body back to Egypt. I’ve always had an impression that Great-grampy really wished to be entombed over there, in spite of his remarks about wanting to go to rest with his old friends in the Burying Ground. They might have arranged it—the two of them.”
“Piero? Who the devil is he?”
“He was the local undertaker—a boon companion of the old man’s. They used to play cards and dominoes together, and argue about funeral customs, embalming, mausoleums and things.”
“Is this man still alive?”
“Goodness, no! He’s been dead twenty years. Even his mortuary is gone. They’ve built a motel on the site.”
“Lovely,” she commented bitterly.
“Yes, I’ll bet he’s in Egypt,” I said, now convinced of it. “He and Piero always acted like a couple of conspirators. They probably had the funeral here, just for the sake of the family’s feelings. What tricksters!”
Glowering, she said, “I don’t believe it. How could it have been arranged? Who would’ve handled it at the other end? You’re talking rubbish.”
I didn’t contradict her. Thinking that a drink would be welcome, I fetched a bottle of whiskey from the kitchen and poured out two stiff measures. She accepted one readily, drank, licked her lips with a pink tongue, and all at once lost her tautness. Relaxed, she appeared smaller, less formidable. For a spell, neither of us said anything. The house was quite still; because of the lateness of the hour, even the street noises were subdued.
Finally I broke the silence. “This business of the prehistoric papyrus—have you any proof of its existence, Madge?”
“The papyrus? That was just a possibility. What I’m hunting for could be any one of a number of things,” she said. “I have no proofs, only clues. A. Edward Pendleton found something, of that I’m certain. And he considered it to be a major discovery.”
She sighed and crossed her crooked ankle over her sound one, then went on. “Listen, Al—in 1872 he was in Luxor. He was rich because he’d just sold a boatload of Spencer rifles to some sheiks in Cyrenaica. He was living like a sheik himself—champagne, women, whatever he fancied. Every now and then he’d get together a band of fellahin and go and dig in the Valley of the Kings, across the river. He admits he never found anything important. Then something happened. In the space of a few weeks his life changes. He gives up carousing; he seems to be short of money; his writings take a mystical turn; he becomes very studious; and he makes vague, oblique references to a sensational find.”
“Couldn’t this sensational find be a psychic experience of some kind?” I asked. “Maybe that’s all he meant.”
“No—when he speaks of it, he speaks of it as a thing of substance. It’s an object, or a collection of objects. I suspect he bought it from someone, and that’s where his money went to. However he obtained it, it made an enormous impression on him. Right then and there he adopted the Egyptian religion—Ra, Osiris, Isis, Hathor, and all the rest. He began saying the prayers and memorizing the complicated ceremonies. His notebooks during this time make weird reading. He declares that Christianity is an apostasy, a return to barbarism. He says that nothing of worth has happened in the world since the decline of the Nile civilization. He considers the Semitic, Persian, Greek and Roman cultures to be trifles—minor offshoots whose histories are counted in centuries, compared to the millennia of the Pharaohs. The old bird—though he wasn’t old then—convinced himself that he was an ancient Egyptian, incredible as it seems.”
Taking an embroidered handkerchief from her handbag, she patted her brow and temples with it. “Let me tell you a story—one that’s historically true,” she continued. “In 1871, a year before your great-grandfather’s conversion, an illegal digger named Ahmed Abderrasul made one of the most astounding archaeological discoveries ever, in the hills east of the Valley. Together with his brother and another man, he came upon a deep crevice in the face of a limestone cliff. At the bottom of this fissure, a shaft had been sunk some thirty feet into the rock. Ahmed volunteered to explore it and went down on a rope. Finding a sealed passage, he smashed it open and entered a corridor. The corridor led to a gallery, and the gallery was crammed with mummies and tomb furnishings. All the sons of Islam, Al, are very shrewd. This one immediately recognized the uraeus, or royal cobra, on the foreheads of the bodies. He knew, therefore, that they were Pharaohs or of Pharaonic blood, and that he was looking on a treasure of incalculable value.
“Our Ahmed was a sly rogue, even for an Arab. Shouting that he’d seen an evil spirit—an afreet, as they’re called—he ran back out to the bottom of the shaft and begged his companions to pull him up as quickly as possible, which they did. Then all three fled. That night, however, the cunning Ahmed returned to the spot with a donkey, killed the animal, pushed it into the shaft and covered it with stones. An afreet, you see, is supposed to give off an evil smell. The heat would soon make the carcass noxious, and any curious meddlers would
be scared away. Secrecy was essential. He knew that if word of the discovery got out, the authorities would confiscate everything.”
Madge paused to sip her whiskey.
“It’s like a tale from The Arabian Nights,” I said.
“Except that it’s true,” said she.
There was weariness in her voice. The banjo clock in the hall ticked loudly, like a metronome. I guessed it to be three in the morning. Where would the lady sleep? I wondered.
“Let me explain how these mummies happened to be in such a queer little place,” she resumed once more. “Egyptian tombs—despite the pyramids, the hewn-stone rooms, the false passages, the massive rock portals that sealed entrances, and all the other ingenious features designed to thwart intruders—were usually broken into only a short while after the funeral. An engineer, an artisan, a priest—there was always someone who knew how to reach the burial chamber. Even the risk of divine punishment—no small thing in their lives—couldn’t deter these thieves because the wealth to be gained was so enormous. They were willing to risk body and soul for it. That’s why a completely untouched tomb has never been found. Tutankhamen’s even, contrary to popular belief, had been broken into, but there the robbers had been disturbed—caught, maybe—before they really got down to business. Afterward the priests resealed the door.
“From a religious standpoint, the worst part of this pilfering was that the corpse was generally destroyed, and with it the owner’s chance at immortality. Jewels were embedded in the mummies, so the thieves literally tore them limb from limb. People will do anything for money, won’t they? Now, what happened with these Pharaohs in the crevice was this: three thousand years ago they had been removed from their original tombs by the priests, hauled over the Theban hills—probably in the dead of night, to preserve secrecy—and rehidden in this specially prepared, crude vault. The idea was to foil the desecrators. It was a good idea, too, since it succeeded for a long, long, long time.”
“Imagine!” I said, bemused. “What an intriguing yarn! One can almost envision them transporting the coffins beneath the stars. They were a curious, fascinating people, weren’t they?”
“Have you never heard this story before?” she asked.
“Never. Why, it’s a gem!”
She eyed me contemplatively, nodded, uncrossed her ankles and said, “There’s more to be told, Al. The Arab, Ahmed, waited a few weeks until he was sure all the local people knew the crevice was an evil place; then he removed the dead donkey and began peddling the treasure, piece by piece, to wealthy foreigners. He did this for eight or nine years, and barely put a dent in his hoard. At last the police got wind of it; the scoundrel was arrested, and tortured till he revealed the secret. An assistant of Maspero’s, from the Department of Antiquities, went to the site. He had expected something marvelous, but what he found exceeded that expectation tremendously.”
Madge stopped to take a breath. Her soiled hands gripped tightly the head of the walking stick, and there was a hint of rapture in her expression. “Ramses the Second was there; Sesostris was there, and Sethi the First, and the three Thutmoses, and Ahmes, and Amenophis the First. There were thirty-six mummies—all belonging to royalty. The greatest rulers of Egypt were in that limestone chamber. It was an archaeologist’s dream come true, a storehouse of wonders. How thrilling it must’ve been to discover such a place! Of course, the solid-gold coffins weren’t there; they’d probably been stolen before the reburial. There were plenty of other things, however—bronzes, funeral tents, wooden chests stuffed with clothing, libation vessels, rolls and rolls of papyri, couches, glazed quartz figures, enameled jewel boxes, hampers filled with food, porphyry jars, rings and necklaces and trinkets of every description.”
“The cave of Ali Baba!” I murmured, quite dazzled by her word picture. “It must’ve been like that wonderful show of years back, Chu Chin Chow.”
Her hands relaxed on the silver cane head. She took up her glass and drank from it.
A question popped into my brain. “But what has this enchanting story to do with Great-grampy?” I asked.
“Perhaps everything, perhaps nothing,” she replied.
“You must think his precious revelation came from that gallery. Is that it, Madge?”
“It’s certainly a possibility.”
“Why?”
“Well, for one thing, he mentions having bought some gold-and-carnelian collars from an Arab named Ahmed in February of 1872. It could’ve been this bird, Ahmed Abderrasul.”
“Oh? But isn’t Ahmed a very common Moslem name?”
“Yes. That doesn’t disprove the hypothesis, however. Look at that Canopic jar on your mantel, there,” she said, pointing with the stick. “The cartouche on it is that of the Pharaoh Sesostris, one of the kings in the chamber. What’s more, that ushabti you sold to the Turk, and which I later bought, belonged to another of those kings, Amenophis. It’s possible, I admit, that these things came from the original tombs and weren’t transported up into the hills with the mummies, but it’s also possible that they were.”
“An interesting idea,” I said.
“Doesn’t it strike you as a little strange, Al, that your Great-grampy, who loved telling stories, never told you this one?”
“Yes, that is unusual, isn’t it?”
“Who knows? Maybe he had a chance to look into that fabulous chamber, maybe he saw all those Pharaohs and queens and princes and princesses and the piles of treasure, and maybe the sight jolted him so that he was converted to the Egyptian religion on the spot. After all, it’s not such a rare event—an instantaneous conversion. The Bible is full of them.”
She finished her whiskey and got up. “I’ll sleep on that sofa in the library,” she declared, starting for the stairs.
“The sofa? You won’t be comfortable on that,” I said, hastily rising myself. “Use the guest room, why don’t you?”
“All I require is a pillow and a sheet. The sofa will be more than adequate,” she answered.
At the foot of the staircase I caught up with her, and brought her to a halt by slipping my arms around her waist. Though her body stiffened, she didn’t struggle. I kissed her on the nape. The softness of her midriff beneath my fingers made my heart thump like a drum in a circus parade, while her camphorate perfume inflamed my senses. I kissed her little ear.
“Al, please! It will be daylight soon,” she said then, unfolding my arms from around her. “I’m exhausted.” A trace of annoyance, though not of real anger, tinged her words. For a moment I considered being forceful, but the moment passed and I let her go.
Reaching the top of the stairs, she called down to ask where the linen closet was, and I told her. Ten minutes later I went up myself. When I tried the library door, I found that it was locked.
“Good night!” she said from behind it.
“Good night, Madge,” I replied forlornly. “Good night.”
13
A LITTLE PIECE OF BUSINESS
Time, I’m convinced, is circular—not straight, as is commonly thought. Like Albert Einstein’s universe, it curves. Ultimately we will arrive back at the very point from which we started out, as do thoroughbreds on a racetrack.
What was it that I was going to say? Ah, yes! I only wished to remark on how fuzzy and . . . and unsymmetrical time can occasionally become. This period that I am now going to describe was that way. It was Einstein, too, who explained his theory of relativity by a simple illustration. “If you hold a young woman for an hour,” said he, “it seems like a minute. But if you hold a hot stove for a minute, it seems like an hour.” Just so.
Therefore, when I say that Mahir Suleyman came to visit me the night after our futile search for Great-grampy, I may be mistaken. It may have been two days later, or even three. But no matter—come he did. It was about seven-thirty in the evening; Madge had been gone for a couple of hours.
This time he ignored the saber-legged chair and sat instead on the settee. “I don’t see you no more,” he said directl
y. “You have retired, Al, from the antique business?”
“Yes, for the moment,” I replied. “I haven’t been to you because I haven’t needed money.”
“I know,” said he.
“You do, Mahir? How?”
“This afternoon I saw you. You were riding your new automobile,” he said. Then he gave me a wink.
“Welladay!” I exclaimed. “I only just bought the thing. You saw me driving it home from the showroom. Why didn’t you call me? I’d have given you a lift. It’s a Mercedes-Benz—a very fine machine.”
“Yes, very fine. I know that car. It is German. There are many in Stamboul, but only people of wealth have them. Evet—I would not mind being a man who has a Mercedes car, but I am too, too poor. A thing like that—ha, it is expensive.”
The fellow looked just a bit smug when he said this, but I thought nothing of it.
“What about a glass of brandy?” I asked him.
“I think no,” he replied, bowing his dark head slightly. “I drank with my dinner a little Metaxa, and for me that is enough. Tell me one thing, Al. This archaeology lady—is she buying some objects from you?”
“Nothing at all, Mahir. She’s only interested in my great-grandfather’s books.” It dawned on me then that my new automobile was giving him erroneous ideas, so I added, “And, as I’ve said, I haven’t needed money. A couple of weeks ago I received a small inheritance from a relative.”
The Turk smiled and said, “I am happy for your good luck.”
This smile he gave me appeared less polite than skeptical. It suddenly struck me that his whole manner was peculiar, that there was something insolent in it. I made no comment, however. I sat there and waited.
“The lady comes to this house every day,” he declared, idly fingering the lapel of his glossy jacket.
The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton Page 11